On Immunity: An Inoculation

“She advances from all sides, like a chess player, drawing on science, myth, literature… . What she
seems to be suggesting is that knowledge isn’t an inoculation. It doesn’t happen just once. There are
things that must be learned and learned again, seen first with the mind and felt later in the body.”
[Link]

New York Times Book Review

“There are many wonderful, illuminating reflections in On Immunity: how vaccine refusal in Pakistan and Nigeria
can be understood as a legitimate form of anti-colonial resistance; how capitalism has inadvertently limited our
imaginations by making us blame it for everything; how metaphors of the body at ‘war’ with bacteria are misleading,
and ‘war’ should be left to warmongers.”
[Link]

Guardian

“This elegant, intelligent and very beautiful book… is elliptical, elusive, neither
collection nor narrative exactly but more a set of questions about how we frame our interactions with the
world.”
[Link]

Los Angeles Times

“The power of Biss’s book stems, in the end, from its subtle insistence on the interrelationship of
things—of the mythological and the medical, the private and the public, the natural and the unnatural—and
on the idea that one’s relationship with disease and immunity is not distinct from one’s relationship with
the world.”
[Link]

Slate

“On Immunity might be classified as a work of deep ecology. It sees, for example, the body as a garden,
the immune ‘system’ as a tidal ebb and flow, and immunity as inseparable from community.”
[Link]

The Rumpus

“Biss’s project, it turns out, is far grander than a simple explanation of the facts…. On Immunity is as
much a book about trust as it is a book about vaccines.”
[Link]

“On Immunity rejects the metaphors of acquisition and contamination for a microcosmic communism: ‘We owe
each other our bodies.’ What else might we reinvent with that new language?”
[Link]

Hazlitt

“In an impeccably researched book that spans centuries, continents and cultures, ultimately Biss is asking:
What do we do with our fear — of our government, of others, of sickness, of our own bodies? She uses stirring language
that leaves the reader unsettled, unsure of where the individual ends and the community begins.”

Kansas City Star

“On Immunity is a history, a personal narrative, ultimately a powerful argument that reads, the whole time, like a poem.”

Guernica

“With bureaucratic hurdles delaying Ebola treatments, this book seems especially timely. But the scope of Biss’s argument and
the grace of her prose make it timeless.”
[Link]

Maclean's

“Deftly interweaving personal history, cultural analysis, science journalism, and literary
criticism, On Immunity investigates vaccinations from many angles—as the mechanism that protects us from
disease, a metaphor for our wish for invulnerability, and a class-based privilege… . [Biss] has
been compared to Joan Didion, and the reasons are obvious here. Like Didion she has a gift for coming at
her subjects from all sides, in unsentimental, lyrical prose.”

Bookforum

“Here's the biggest twist: On Immunity is not actually about vaccination. This is a deeply
philosophical book, one that’s less concerned with pure science than with the elemental fear that we can
never protect our children from the world.”
[Link]

Entertainment Weekly

“On Immunity casts a spell…. There’s drama in watching this smart writer feel her way through this material. She’s a poet, an essayist and a class spy. She reveals herself as believer and apostate, moth and flame.”

New York Times

“Biss, whose first book was the splendid 2009 essay collection Notes from No Man’s Land, specializes in radical empathy.” [Link]

New Republic

“Her mind is everywhere at once, and her conclusions are subtle, deeply felt, and convincing.” [Link]

Fiction Advocate

“[Biss] brings a sober, erudite, and humane voice to an often overheated debate.” [Link]

The New Yorker

“A brilliant and empathic exploration of the vaccine wars, at once entertaining and useful, for
parents or anyone else seeking a more complex understanding of immunology and vaccines. Biss’s respectful
argument for continued childhood inoculation makes her book—full of scintillating narratives, riveting
bits of history, and touching memoirs that can be relished for their own sake—one that all vaccine
skeptics should read.”

American Scholar

“Biss infuses her in-depth study on why we as a society fear vaccines with her own experiences with raising a child. She cites literary greats (Sontag, Stoker, Voltaire) on the topic of immunization, connecting literary history with our deep-rooted avoidance of protective shots.”

The Huffington Post

“Biss wants to move beyond polarizing, two-sided battles — specifically, battles over vaccination —
where the contestants try to bring their opponents over to their side, and instead think of argument as a
careful weighing of evidence, a moving forward with an open mind, an attempt to find new ways of seeing
the old ideas. Her book embodies this definition of argument in its thoughtfulness and its careful
consideration of what makes people believe what they do.” [Link]

Full Stop

“Using vaccines as a metaphor for our fears, Biss writes a series of short, interconnected essays to
highlight how—well, how very interconnected our fears, hopes, and bodies are. It is an argument for a very
un-American view of science. It asks us to believe in myths, and it asks us to look at the preservation of
an entire community instead of the individual.”
[Link]

Christianity Today

“She understands the marrow-deep desire people have to protect their children, whatever the risks
and costs, and this empathy (more than the book’s research) is Biss’s triumph, and what makes her voice so
important in the nationwide debate for or against vaccinations.“
[Link]

The Brooklyn Rail

“On Immunity is as much a meditation about community in an era of increasing privatization, as it is
a sweeping synthesis of scientific research.” [Link]

Feministing

“Her far-reaching and unusual investigation into immunity includes a discussion of the chemicals
thimerosal and triclosan, Dracula, measles and smallpox, the hygiene hypothesis, herd immunity, Achilles
and Voltaire, altruism, and the appeal of alternative medicine. Artfully mixing motherhood, myth,
maladies, and metaphors into her presentation, Biss transcends medical science and trepidation.”

Booklist, Starred Review

“Brightly informative, giving readers a sturdy platform from which to conduct their own research and
take personal responsibility.”
[Link]

Kirkus, Starred Review

“Biss frankly and optimistically looks at our ‘unkempt’ world and our shared mission to protect one another.” [Link]

Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays

“Eula Biss' Notes From No Man's Land is the most accomplished book of essays anyone has
written or published so far in the 21st century.” [Link]

Salon

“This book is a beautiful exercise in consciousness; in bringing both intelligence and experience to
bear on a subject that has implications for the way one behaves in the world.”

Los Angeles Times

“Biss’s pairings of ideas, like those of most original thinkers, have the knack of seeming
brilliant and obvious at the same time. The book’s first essay, ‘Time and Distance
Overcome,’ intersperses brief fragments on the creation of our country’s network of telephone
poles with the history of another American innovation: lynching.” [Link]

NPR

“Biss moves through language like a spider spinning a web, delicately linking telephone poles and
lynch mobs, Laura Ingalls Wilder's ‘Little House’ books and Biss’s own Rogers Park
neighborhood. Biss writes like a poet, evoking images with a cool passion, and she plays with ideas on the
page and challenges readers to work out their own rhythms.” [Link]

Chicago Tribune

“Biss is up to something else, something wonderfully mature, intelligent, and new. In these essays,
Biss reexamines not only her own history but that of her country, revealing in both delicate, poetic prose
and blunt, necessarily emotionless journalism the truths, both painful and triumphant, of the American
experiment.” [Link]

American Book Review

“Biss calls our attention to things so intrinsic to our lives they have become invisible, such as
telephone poles and our assumptions about race…. With nods to Didion and Baldwin, her sinuous essays dart
off and zigzag, and we hold on tight. Biss compares the lesson plans for freed slaves in
Reconstruction-era public schools with what is taught to today's African American students, and chronicles
her experiences as a minority in black worlds, including her stint as a reporter for an African American
community newspaper in San Diego. Matters of race, sense of self, and belonging involve everyone, and
Biss' crossing-the-line perspective will provoke fresh analysis of our fears and expectations.”

Booklist, Starred Review

“An intense, sensitive author and journalist with a restless spirit and a whip-crack wit, Biss (The
Balloonists) presents a collection of short essays on race in America that spans an impressive range,
beginning with a gripping narrative connecting the history of the telephone pole with the history of
lynching. As her stories progress, Biss extrapolates a great deal about America's complicated racial
attitudes from her own experience—teaching in Harlem, living in a diverse Chicago neighborhood, watching
the long, sad saga of Hurricane Katrina from Iowa. The result is a personal, opinionated and accessible
collection; Americans of any background, while they may disagree with her point of view, will see a
country they recognize in settings as diverse as deepest Brooklyn or a Mexican border retreat.” [Link]

Publishers Weekly

“The concluding essay in the collection is called ‘All Apologies.’ It’s a series of apologies (and
non-apologies) issued throughout history…. At the end of the essay, Biss writes, ‘I apologize for
slavery.’ It’s less an admission of wrongdoing than a classic apologia—a formal defense, and implicit
examination, of her own conduct, which is what underpins this entire book. The reader is once again
reminded of those telephone poles at the turn of the twentieth century, which served as both gallows and
technological thruway. That nexus implicates all of us, and Biss puts it in plain view: for a moment, at
least, we see even what is unseen.” [Link]

Columbia Journalism Review

“Biss’s examination of America’s complicated racial heritage offers penetrating insight. In ‘Back to
Buxton,’ she contrasts the supposedly progressive university in Iowa City, where white and black students
rarely cross paths, with the early-20th-century hamlet of Buxton, a small, Jim Crow–era town that
functioned, briefly, as a desegregated utopia…. 'Is this Kansas?,' in particular, raises some troubling
questions about the way the young are trained to view tragedies like Katrina—often through the harsh lens
of racial stereotypes. Telephone poles may be on their way out, but at moments like these, Biss still
encourages us to reach out and connect.” [Link]

Time Out New York

“Biss’s undertaking, then, is to lead us into no man’s land by uncovering how
we’re already there. Drawing upon stories from the media, historical records, sociological research,
and her own keenly observed experiences, she demonstrates how the legacy of racism has left the U.S. a
kind of disputed ground, a place of confusion where whites and blacks may find belonging within their own
racial groups but struggle to belong together as Americans.”

The Literary Review

“I can hardly speak of this book, honestly: it’s heartrendingly amazing and so
completely/complexly itself that the idea of trying to encapsulate it’s laughable. What it is, for
sure, is this: it’s Eula Biss wondering about and poring over and looping back on/through ideas
about race and self and home and America. I know that that process—someone at the wheel, driving into the
big dark map of self/race/America—is only fully magnificent in the hands/words of a few artists, but
let’s here be totally clear that Eula Biss is one of those artists, someone whose work, if made
mandatory consumption for the country, would enrich and enlarge each of us to a point of fullness
that’s almost scary.” [Link]

Corduroy Books

“Biss’s essays read like constellations; she sets her stars in place to refract a picture far
brighter than any individual star. But Biss’s most successful accomplishment isn’t her framework,
but her ability to transition from the innocent to the reproachable without revealing the intricacies of her
sleight of hand.”

Pleiades

“Blending contemporary racial theory with historical examples such as the 1939 Clark ‘doll
studies’ (which revealed the disheartening ethnic biases of young children), Biss displays an impressive
depth of knowledge as well as feeling.”

The Balloonists

“Laced with a simplicity as lucid as it is sincere, as much a meditation on marriage as it is on
memory, Eula Biss’s The Balloonists weaves a tapestry of multiple narratives, collective family memories
and stunningly rendered moments with impressive concinnity into an intriguing and oftentimes luminous
first book.”

Slope

“In the morally dubious, aesthetically risky, kind of great prelude, Biss crosscuts black-box
transcripts with sound-bites from family members concerning her mother’s own thwarted artistic ambitions.
The brief, intimate impressions that follow read like carefully selected diary entries; something like
Renata Adler cool-neon fragments, as melancholy as they are wry.”

The Believer

“Biss’s slender debut collection is as spare as a Japanese watercolor. Her narrative prose poems
limn, via a series of interwoven subjects and themes, the story of a family, complete with a cast of
characters and time lines, a tale that, by extension, transcends into the universal.”

Booklist

“In a beautiful blending of narrative styles (dialogue, brief anecdotes and narrative theory) Biss
navigates her narrative through complex relationships, re-mapping previously charted territory, however,
with one important distinction—she offers no set destinations and no pre-drawn conclusions. Instead, The
Balloonists is a continuation of life’s ‘unresolved arguments.’”

Double Room

“Biss particularly succeeds in examining the similarities between fictional narrative and
autobiography, how the stories we call our lives are, in fact, a form of fiction, and how we can
unwittingly find ourselves living a story not our own. ‘What if an entire generation were to reject their
central story line?’ she wonders. Her book’s ambiguity as to genre serves to keep the narrative on a
tightrope, nimbly balancing itself between truth and fiction, while always calling into question the
reality of both concepts.”